A few weekends ago I started on an ambitious project to remove as much paper from my life as possible, starting with the pile of paper that needs to be filed that is building up next to my desk – I was inspired in a big way by this video up on Channel 9.
To date my wife has been doing an admirable job taking care of filing activites but its time to give her a break – and make that information more accessible at the same time.
Looking at the tools I have at my disposal, there is a scanner. Microsoft Office and a bucket load of storage that can be easily backed up to DVD. So I started scanning, and on that first weekend I scanned a hundred or so pages using the Microsoft Document Imaging program.
The nice thing about this is that it performs OCR on the document text and embeds it as meta-data into the TIFF or MDI file formats, then when placed on the file system, the scanned documents can be keyword searched, so if I wanted to find out when I called a particular phone number I just type it in and bingo, it gives me a list of all the phone bills that have calls to that number in them.
As I started working through this material I determined a few things (in no particular order):
- I need a scanner with a paper feeder.
- The out end of the scanner needs to be attached to a shredder.
- Tagging is required when OCR doesn’t work.
- Where do I store this crap?
Thats why my eyes lighted up when I read this post. I think we are close to a time where we can outsource our personal records management to some third party that we TRUST. Now – I suspect this is a game that both Microsoft and Google want to be in, MSN “Spaces” should be a big hint.
The problem is, I don’t know if I trust either organisation to protect my information forever and a day. I haven’t been burnt personally but I know a few people that haven’t been happy with MSN changing the policy on what services are free and what services cost a fee.
And despite the general consensus I feel that as Google grows its “not evil” moniker will change to something more inline with shareholder values (if they wanted to change the world they shouldn’t have floated).
What I really want a solution that integrates well with the tools that I use today – and tomorrow, so the underlying storage model needs to be flexible (WinFS, if it ever arrives will be a compelling client-side version of what I want), but that should only be a cache – I want my information accessible anywhere and on any device.
I want to know how much it costs today, and how much it will cost tomorrow, I’m not stupid enough to believe that this service will be free, I’d be willing to pay a small monthy fee (indexed with inflation) for the rest of my life to:
- Have the information available anywhere.
- Have it searchable.
- Be able to do bulk extractions and inserts (to move providers).
- Never run out of space – even if I decide to copy the entire contents of a DVD into it every month or so.
- Index everything including video, audio and text.
Number three is kind of interesting I think. Since this thing is going to record my life, its going to need to record my work information as well – e-mails, documents, everything. However, you’ll find that in most employment agreements you need to surrender corporate information if you change jobs. So I need to be able to say give me all my work related stuff and export it to this media.
Anyway – its certainly an interesting area, and something that I think could take computing to the next level in terms of utility.